Mental simulation in literal and figurative language understanding
(2004)

Suppose you ask a colleague how a class he just taught went, and he replies that "It was a great class the students were glued to their seats." There are two clearly distinct interpretations of this utterance, which might usefully be categorized as a literal and a figurative one. Which interpretation you believe is appropriate will determine your course of action; whether you congratulate your colleague for his fine work, or whether you report him to the dean for engaging in false imprisonment. What distinguishes between these two types of interpretation? Classically, the notions of literalness and figurativity are viewed as pertaining directly to language words have literal meanings, and can be used figuratively when specific figures of speech cue appropriate interpretation processes (Katz 1977, Searle 1978, Dascal 1987). Indeed, this approach superficially seems to account for the two interpretations described above. The literal (and one would hope, less likely) interpretation involves simply interpreting each word in the sentence and their combination in terms of its straightforward meaning the glue is literal glue and the seats are literal seats. The figurative interpretation, by contrast, requires knowledge of an idiom a figure of speech. This idiom has a particular form, using the words glued, to, and seat(s), with a possessive pronoun or other noun phrase indicating who was glued to their seat(s) in the middle. It also carries with it a particular meaning: the person or people described were in rapt attention. Thus the figurative interpretation of the sentence differs from the literal one in that the meaning to be taken from it is not built up compositionally from the meanings of words included in the utterance. Rather, the idiom imposes a non-compositional interpretation. As a result, the meaning of the whole can be quite distinct from the meanings of the words included within the idiom. This distinction between idiomaticity and compositionality is an important component of the classical figurative-literal distinction. A consequence of equating figurativity with particular figures of speech is that figurative language can be seen as using words in ways that differ from their real, literal meaning. While this classical notion of figurative and literal language may seem sensible, it leads to a number of incorrect and inconsistent claims about the relation between literal and figurative language. (Note that although it is not strictly correct to talk about language itself as being literal or figurative instead we should discuss acts of figurative or literal language processing we will adopt this convention for ease of exposition.) One major problem is that it claims that figurative language processing mechanisms are triggered by language explicit linguistic cues or figures of speech. Indeed, such appears to be case in the above example, but in many cases it is not. A sentence like You'll find yourself glued to the latest shareholders' report can be interpreted "figuratively" even though it has in it no figure of speech equivalent of glued to X's seat(s) that might trigger a search for such an interpretation. The only trigger for this figurative meaning is the verb glue, which would be hard to justify as an idiom or figure of speech. The absence of overt indicators of figurativity might lead us to hypothesize that some words may encode both literal and figurative meanings (as suggests by